You Can Unlock 280 Character Tweets Right Now

Yesterday, Twitter removed its signature restriction and doubled the maximum length of tweets to 280, thereby making itself either twice as good or twice as bad depending on your point of view.

The catch is that the update is rolling out slowly, and only a select few currently have the ability to swim in a sea of characters. Fortunately, as Twitter user Prof 9 discovered and The Verge pointed out, you can jump the line with a few clicks, at least if you use Google Chrome.

Here's a quick TamperMonkey script that force enables 280 character tweets in the Twitter web client.https://t.co/uUhW0CKekS

All you have to do is install an extension called Tampermonkey, which helps you run "userscripts" that allow you to tweak some details of websites right in your browser. After that, you simply need to install Prof9's userscript from Github by clicking the button on the page that is labeled "Raw," which forces Twitter to give you the 280 character superpower.

If that sounds complicated or scary, it's neither. It's only about four clicks and this is what they look like:

After that, you'll be able to tweet from Twitter.com without the 140 character restriction. You'll know the fix is working if the character counter doesn't go down from "140" as you type. The script can be a little finicky, but simply refresh the page if it breaks. Besides, this will be the norm soon enough.

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